Greenbelt Fund grants announced

Saturday, February 1, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

Local Food Plus and Sustain Ontario were two of the Toronto-area organizations getting grants from the Greenbelt Fund and provincial government last month for projects to ensure more local food is served and distributed in the province.

The Greenbelt Fund announced a total of $470,000 in grants for six projects. The Fund supports projects throughout the food sector, from farmers to public institutions, to ensure more Ontario food is served and distributed through public institutions, retail and foodservice markets, it says in a Jan. 22 press release.

Local Food Plus received $15,000 for a new project designed to assess the market demand for delivering a brokerage service for local and sustainable foods. Broker services are used in the food industry to access hard-to-reach markets and pose an alternative to companies having to hire a sales force, the release says.

Local Food Plus is a non-profit organization. It certifies farms and processors for environmentally and socially sustainable practices and makes connections throughout the supply chain.

Sustain Ontario received $10,000 in funding to work with two to three municipalities to create implementation plans for local buying programs. Sustain Ontario is a province-wide alliance of diverse sectors that promotes healthy food and farming.

Other groups getting grants this time were: 100km Foods Inc., Aramark Canada, the Hospital for Sick Children and a joint project of George Brown College and St. Michael’s Hospital.

Burkhard Mausberg, Greenbelt Fund CEO, says grants are handed out every three to six months. Applicants can submit applications at anytime, and these are reviewed by Fund staff members and an advisory committee. The Fund can also call on independent experts to review applications. The Fund’s board approves the grants.

“Our goal is to affect the food value chain from farm to folk,” he says noting the grants are given to approved projects being done by farmers, distributors, foodservice companies and all the way up the chain to public institutions.

“We’re particularly targeting public institutions for two reasons,” he says. One is by having public institutions be a leader in the procurement and use of local food, other groups can learn from that experience and the knowledge can be transferred to private sector organizations. Another reason is since public institutions are funded by taxpayers they should be making an effort to buy their food and food products from Ontario farmers. “There is a bit of a moral obligation” for them to do that, he says.

Since it was launched in 2010, the Fund has supported 78 projects with a total of $7.4 million. The Fund is supported by public and private sources. BF